


Picking up the Pieces

by penombrelilas (crookedspoon)



Series: The Sound by Which I Live and Die [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Community: 31_days, Gen, Wordcount: 100-500
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-25
Updated: 2009-09-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 16:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2355176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/penombrelilas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To him, it was a relic of failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picking up the Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Written on Sep 25, 2009 for the prompt "falling in love is searching for missing pieces of ourselves" from 31_days.

Water dripped onto the paper like tears – his brush would not touch the white surface. He had an image in mind, painful and sweet, an easy subject that hung above his desk, but all that formed were dirty, meandering creaks where the color blended together.

He thought he saw a flicker at the edge of his vision. He looked up at his model. It could not have moved – it hadn't for years. The Blue Mountain Swallowtail still graced the same spot on the wall where she had hung its glass case, a souvenir from her Australia exchange. Only the surroundings have changed: a sea of photographs, landscape pictures differing in time and region, places he had visited with his loved ones; memories lingered in each of them, growing fainter with time, like the smell of cigarettes in abandoned houses.

Back then, she had laughed and said the severed wing was quite symbolic, a soul trapped inside a cage, unable to fly away from life and death, no chance at rebirth. He had often wondered if she had plucked the wing herself, like a wild flower, or if she had found it like this: broken, incomplete.

To him, it was a relic of failure. An island sticking out in a sea of failed relationships, hard to miss and unforgettable. Somewhere on that island, he suspected a part of himself. The one she had taken when she left, like the keys of his car.

Maybe it had never been a part of his to start with; maybe it had been hers all along, something she brought with her, something that fit perfectly within himself, that he mistook for his own and ached now because he lost it.

No one else before or after left a hole gaping quite like that, black and abyssal, as though something physical had been cut off, like a finger or an ear – or a wing.

He crumpled the paper and cleaned the brushes. He craved for a cigarette, for the toxic smoke to fill the hole. One day, he told himself, he would be able to paint her broken butterfly – he still thought of it as hers; he could never quite accept the gift. And when that day came, he would have gotten over her.

Some new heartache was sure to come. We're all pieces of a puzzle, searching for the missing ones to complete us. We need others for that. We're not whole at birth (or rebirth), because what end would we strive toward if not completion? Where would be the sweet pain of longing or the bitter taste of loss?

Every person we connect with leaves a piece and takes a piece, balancing the scale. Sometimes we don't need to look over the horizon to find what we're missing; sometimes it's right beside us, like the wing of her butterfly.


End file.
